Fog vs. Sun

Fog is romantic at one precise moment … when walking across a bridge at twilight, hand in hand with your wife, the streetlights wearing halos and the moist air tingling your nose.

The rest of the time, fog sucks. It is one of the primary reasons that we got the heck out of Dodge and moved across the ridge of the Apennines to Levanto. But even though we knew from years of experience that the weather here is better than in Parma, today was yet another reminder of how much better it is. Erica got a live weather report from one of her best friends at 2 p.m.: 38 degrees, foggy and dank. In Levanto at 2 p.m.: blinding sun, blue skies, and 62 degrees. But it’s not the temperature that matters … it’s the light. For people like me, an adequate dose of sunshine is an important variable in quality of life standards, and there just wasn’t enough of it in Parma, just like there wasn’t enough of it back in my days in Ann Arbor and Iowa City. It took three years in Africa to cure those doldrums. It’s no wonder why so many religions have their origins in sun-worship. It gives us energy, it gives us life, and it just makes your day better.